From Survival to Situational Success

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Ultimately, the last display of different actions being performed due to an uncommon situation occurs at the end of the story. George kills Lennie, his best friend. He was put in a situation where ending Lennie’s life would be beneficial for everyone. He believes he has no other choice. Lennie has killed a person; Curley’s wife. George knows that Curley would do anything to get revenge. No matter what, Curley will be able to somehow kill Lennie and give him a slow painful death. Even if Lennie is jailed, Curley can assassinate him there and if not, Lennie will suffer in jail anyway. And running away with Lennie was no longer an option. George has done it once and he cannot afford to do it again. Ending Lennie’s life is also an act of friendship as well as a desperate act in desperate times. If Lennie and George are not best friends, George might have jailed Lennie or give him a slow death. If the situation is different or not as severe in which Lennie kills a human but something else, George probably will not have been forced to shoot Lennie as alternative solutions would have been possible. Curley would not necessarily be hunting down Lennie and other solutions such as paying off the damage are possible. In the end, it’s the situation one is in that leads to what they do as “desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Above all, the greatest thing that one derives from a situational change is a different view of the world. As they begin to have another perspective on the world, their representations of their thoughts change to fit these new perspectives. These different perspectives and representations can vastly differ from what they originally were. Take Candy for example. Before the novella starts and somewhat into it, Candy owns a dog. Now this dog is old and no longer in its prime. George tells Candy, “’That’s a hell of an old dog’” to which Candy replies, “’Yeah. I had ‘im ever since he was a pup. God, he was a good sheep dog when he was younger’” (Steinbeck 24). Candy and his dog share a close relationship with each other since they are too old for everyone else on the ranch. However, Carlson soon kills the dog with the support of the other skinners saying that the dog no longer served a purpose in life. Even Slim agrees to killing the dog saying, “’That dog ain’t no good to himself. I wisht somebody’d shoot me if I got old an’ cripple’” (Steinbeck 45). After the death of his dog, Candy loses much of the hope in his life, by losing his best friend. He starts to notice his hopelessness within the world and has to change his views accordingly to survive. He gets desperate to the point where he joins George and Lennie’s plan on buying a ranch, knowing he cannot succeed in anything else. He offers them a deal, “’S’pose I went with you guys. Tha’s three hundred,and fifty bucks I’d put in. I ain’t much good, but I could cook and tend chicken and hoe the garden some. How’d that be?” (Steinbeck 59). After experiencing a situation in which he loses his dog, Candy is overcome by helplessness that he begins to think and search for ways to “make it” in the world. Similarly, Crooks also undergoes a change of perception and thinking after a certain event or situation. Of all the characters within the novella, he shows the greatest change of perspective. Before George and Lennie begin working at the ranch, Crooks was a loner. He is the outcast of all the ranchers. He is very distant and unaccepting of friends due to the treatment he receives from everyone else. When Lennie tries to enter his room he says, “’You got no right to come in my room. This here’s my room. Nobody got any right in here but me’” (Steinbeck 68). However, his perspective towards others changes as he begins to make friends. After Crooks befriends Lennie, he is more accepting of others and it is harder for him to reject them from his life. When Candy decides to come in Crooks’ room, Crooks is not hostile towards him as he was to Lennie. “’Come on in. If everybody’s comin’ in, you might just as well.’ It was difficult for Crooks to conceal his pleasure with anger” (Steinbeck 75). All Crooks needs is a friend to change his perspective of the world. With the friend, he can get rid of his excluded introverted thinking and finally open up to others. Without Lennie, Crooks will remain the same hermit of a man he is. Speaking of Lennie, he also experiences a different perspective of the world. Throughout the majority of the novella, Lennie is an innocent and naive character. He does not see the world as others see it. He is simply childish and takes things very simply. Due to his love of soft things but his obliviousness of his own strength, he ends up killing many of the things he adores. However, most of what he accidentally kills consists of wild mice, so the effects the deaths have on him are not severe. These situations are not similar to the one in which Lennie kills Slim’s pup. Unlike previously, Lennie loses his kind and affectionate self. He begins to care less for the dog after it dies and thinks of ways to hide the death such as covering it in hay or lying about the cause of death to George. The dog’s death even causes a darker side of Lennie to reveal itself out of frustration. Shortly after killing the dog, Lenny also kills Curley’s wife out of anger. His anger was able to consume him enough that he ended up killing the lady. As long as the dog doesn’t die, Lennie’s thoughts and perspective of the world will not change. However, since this is not the case, Lennie becomes spiteful of death and his own strength as well as the others’ fragility; he no longer has a childish and innocent view of the world leading him to kill another. As a situation changes ones views and thoughts, the drastic change can lead to severe consequences or beneficiary effects.

All in all, humans are versatile creatures that when dealing with a situation that they are not accustomed to, their perceptions of and reactions to the environment around them change. Of the many changes a human experiences due to a different situation, a change in how one talks is the most common and obvious change. Along with that, one’s body language and preferred actions change with the situation as well as their perception and thoughts on the world around them. Like the chameleon, these changes start to develop as the situation or environment changes. They usually change in regard to success as this follows the theory of evolution. Anyone can change, but those who are successful in life are those that know how to best adapt to the changes of others. Your wealth, size, and even social status can be factors that affect how big of a toll a change takes on you, but the more versatile and adaptable you are, chances are that the change will have a lesser importance. How you evolve